If You're An American Of European Descent, Your Stupid Cousins Have Probably Put You In Vast Commercial Genomic Databases

Remember when they caught the Golden State Killer by comparing DNA crime-scene evidence to big commercial genomic databases (like those maintained by Ancestry.com, 23 and Me, etc) to find his family members and then track him down? It's not just him. If you're an American of US descent, there's a 60% chance that you can be identified from genomic database searches, because even if you've never signed up for one of these junk science services, your stupid cousins have. That's the conclusion of a group of computer science, computational biology, genomics, and public health researchers from Columbia, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who published their findings in the journal Science: Identity inference of genomic data using long-range familial searches (Sci-Hub mirror). They also predict that in the "near future," "nearly any US individual of European descent" will be identifiable from commercial genomic databases. The researchers propose a mitigation technique for avoiding nonconsensual genetic profiling: "DTC providers should cryptographically sign the text file containing the raw data available to customers (fig.